This week on Economic Pulse, host Dr. Kamran Afshar looks at the June data for the Lehigh Valley housing market. While there is potential price strength for the local housing market, there is also low volume and other indicators that predict a decent, but not great summer.

Employment in manufacturing has dropped from 18 million in 1972 to 12 million in 2010, however, the fewer manufacturing employees are producing a lot more products than their significantly larger manufacturing employees did in 1970s.

June consumer sentiment index recorded a slight increase over its May’s level. The index has been relatively unchanged in the last 6 months, this is remarkable considering the size of the GDP drop in the 1st quarter. Consumers clearly considered this a one time events.

The Lehigh Valley’s employment level has now exceeded its pre-recessionary high. However, not all the jobs lost have been recovered. Recoveries in the job market are seldom even across the sectors. Usually the new jobs are somewhat or a lot different from the ones lost. The same is true about the Lehigh Valley’s recovery. Many of the jobs lost are not going to come back. The Valley is moving in the direction of services and away form production.

Payroll employment increased by whopping 217,000 in May. Despite that, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 6.3%. The unemployment rate stayed the same despite the 217,000 new additions to payroll employment because the total number of unemployed increased by 46,000. How did that happen? This is basically a function of the definition of employment. The government’s definition of employed is very broad and appears to have been designed to underestimate the total unemployment.

While inflation over the last 12 months still registers only at a low 2.0%, if we look at the first 4 months of this year the picture changes significantly. The consumer price index, the instrument we use for measuring inflation rose by 1.3% over the last 4 months. This translates into a 5.2% inflation at annual rates. That is if this trend continues for the rest of the year we are going to re-visit inflation for the first time since 2007! (Original air-date 5/16/2014)

On this special hour-long edition of Economic Pulse, Dr. Afshar looks at the financial and economic state of the Lehigh Valley during the first quarter of 2014. His roundtable panel includes Jennifer Mann (President of Mann Consulting), Kevin Flemming (President of Integrity Personnel), and Josh Dodd (Senior Vice President at Univest Bank & Trust). (Original air-date 5/8/2014)

Our national debt is now larger than our GDP, how are we going to pay the interest on such a large debt? Asks Dr. Kamran Afshar.

The National Debt is 101.5% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, not dissimilar to the latter half of the 1940s, when the US economy came out of the Great Depression and WWII had ended. Interest rates were just slightly higher than today’s rates, and the interest payment on the national debt was less than 2% of the GDP, despite the fact that the debt was 21% higher than the GDP of the time.